Put Up Your Dukes

Like most Americans, I've always had a thing for underdogs. That's what makes "Rocky" so endearing, after all. That, combined with my latent Catholicism, has always made me a fan of the Duquesne University basketball team.

And you won't find more of an underdog anywhere than the Dukes, who are licking their wounds after going 8 and 22 (their 11th consecutive losing season) in what Phil Axelrod of the P-G called a "clunker" of a year and the second-worst in Duquesne's history. The worst was just six years ago, when the Dukes went 7 and 23.

I have a feeling that on the Duquesne campus, the "Duquesne Duke" is starting to look about as popular as Archduke Franz Ferdnand, circa 1914. (I understand he's turned down several opportunities to ride in a motorcade around the Bluff.)

One needs only to have read the obituary last week of the great John "Red" Manning to realize what Duquesne has lost. Under Manning, the Dukes were 247 and 138 in 16 seasons. Even after Manning retired, "college basketball" in Pittsburgh for a long time meant "Duquesne University."

Over the last 20 years, the excitement has shifted east to Oakland, and the Dukes are also-rans.

I don't know very much about sports --- but then again, I don't know very much about a lot of things, and that's never stopped me from writing about them --- so it's difficult for me to diagnose what might be wrong with the Dukes. I suspect that it's extremely difficult for a small, Catholic university to recruit basketball players to a relatively parochial city like Pittsburgh, especially when it's in the shadow of a successful team at a larger Big East school.

On the other hand, you don't get much more parochial than Cincinnati, Ohio. And there you have a large university --- the University of Cincinnati --- whose men's team is coming off of a 25-win season and its 14th straight appearance in the NCAA tournament. Across town, there's Xavier, which like Duquesne is a small, Catholic university in the A-10, and their men's team went 26 and 11, and threatened in the conference tournament. I've been to Xavier, and their campus isn't any more attractive than Duquesne's, so I can't imagine there's a great recruiting advantage to working in Cincinnati.

Thus I'm at a loss to understand what Duquesne's major malfunction has been. I'm almost left to wonder if they should get out of big-time college basketball altogether and drop down to Division III, like Carnegie Mellon, but I have to imagine that their alumni would go into apoplexy (much like Carnegie's alumni did in the 1950s when it got out of big-time college athletics).

Is it the coach? Duquesne doesn't seem to think so --- the university extended Danny Nee's contract for two years, but that was before the Dukes' stinkbomb of a 2004-05 season. I do know that when former Dukes and Lakers star Norm Nixon visited the Mon Valley last week to give a talk at Woodland Hills High School, Mike White of the P-G floated the possibility that Nixon would come back to coach at Duquesne.

Nixon's name among Duquesne alumni holds the same magic that Tony Dorsett's name has for Pitt alumni, so if I'm Danny Nee, I'm looking over my shoulder nervously.

Americans like underdogs, but the thing we like about underdogs is when they occasionally triumph over adversity and emerge victorious. (It's worth noting that Duquesne has had some very successful athletic teams --- in baseball and football, for instance --- but the heart of small-college sports is basketball.)

If you never win, however, you get a reputation not as an "underdog," but merely as a "loser." And Americans don't particularly care for "losers."

Now: Don't get me started on the Pirates. There are teams that are "underdogs," and then there are others that are just "frustratingly mediocre."

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By the way, not only do I like underdogs, I also like "Underdog," so I was delighted to see his cameo appearance in a TV commercial for some product the other day. (Of course, you can also buy a boxed set of "Underdog" DVDs I should have suspected as much.)

You can download the "Underdog" theme song here:

When criminals in this world appear
And break the laws that they should fear
And frighten all who see or hear
The cry goes up both far and near
For Underdog! (Underdog!) Underdog! (Underdog!)

Speed of lightning, roar of thunder
Fighting all who rob or plunder
Underdog ... Underdog!

Now that I think of it, perhaps it's Simon Bar Sinister who's behind the slide of Duquesne basketball --- someone get Sweet Polly Purebred on that story! Better yet, look around the mouth of the Armstrong Tunnels for a mild-mannered dog shining shoes. Maybe he can help.

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P.S. Naturally, opinions expressed in the Almanac about college basketball or any other topic are not those of the University of Pittsburgh, or anyone else for that matter. I'm not even sure they're mine!